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The moment between golden and sunshine, 2007
Mike Ryder practices bad painting. It is bad, perhaps, in its refusal to be pigeonholed into a critically marginal reading. As a group, the works cannot be closed down through one avenue of critical investigation. One feels that part of the glee Ryder takes in his practice is exactly this pursuit of – and evasion of – any specific approach to content. Heartfelt cultural references disguise themselves as calculated ploys for attention.
A mindless, abject handling of paint spills over into
a formal orchestration of painting’s 'post-non-representational' tropes. Contemporary myth-making rubs up against critical distance. The wickedly cynical and the earnestly credulous overlap.
The works do not answer any questions, and instead allow us, as viewers, to participate in the playful pursuit of meaning whilst indulging ourselves, with wide eyes, in the visual cacophony that is Mike Ryder’s painting.
Oliver Prothero
1 John Perreault; ‘Bad' Is Good, The Soho Weekly News, January 26, 1978.
2 Albert Oehlen’s term, given by himself for describing his oeuvre.
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It could be argued that bad painting constitutes
a rejection of the concept of progress per se,
and that bypassing the idea of progress implies
an extraordinary freedom to do and to be whatever
you want. One of the most appealing aspects of bad painting is that the ideas of good and bad are flexible and subject to both the immediate and the larger context in which the work is seen .
However, it could equally be argued that this
flexibility – and rejection of the concept – is in fact very important to the contemporary climate of painting, and that rather than continuing in a linear fashion, progress is now spreading outward at the edges.
House About That!, Installation shot, 2007
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